But it develops, and becomes more and more important, until you’re no longer doing combos for the challenge of unlocking more catalogues, but to unlock more story. At first it seems like just flavour, something to distract you from burning stuff. I didn’t realise it until maybe a quarter of the way through the game. I was surprised when I realised that there was a story. Games like Civilization have that “just one more turn” hook – Little Inferno has “just one more combo”. So there’s your first hook – solve the riddles to earn more stars to unlock more riddles and so on and so on. Each combo tells you what items to burn in a cryptic way – some are easier to unravel than others. Stars are earned by burning two or three specific items together. But you open more areas of the store (more catalogues) by earning stars. As shown in the trailer above, you buy things from the store, and burn it. Firstly I discovered that there is a puzzle element to it, with the combos.
I was expecting an idle time-waster in the vein of mobile games, something that I could pick up for a half-hour or so of pyromania and then put aside in favour of “real” games. Finally I saw it as part of a Humble Bundle and by Crom I snatched it up! Even so, it lay neglected, installed on my Steam list for many more months (years? I can’t tell) before I got the urge to actually hit Play. I’d seen the trailer a few times over the course of a year or two, each time it piqued my interest – but not enough to purchase it.